Tom Friedman, writing today about the Arab Spring (4/13/11–the same column Jim Naureckas critiqued for FAIR Blog here):
Another option is that an outside power comes in, as America did in Iraq, and as the European Union did in Eastern Europe, to referee or coach a democratic transition between the distrustful communities in these fractured states.
It’s been a while since I’ve played an organized sport, but if any coach or referee did anything resembling what the U.S. has done in Iraq, they would be removed from the league, and probably put in jail.
That analogy sounded familiar, though. Turns out he’s used it before:
Iraq teaches what it takes to democratize a big tribalized Arab country once the iron-fisted leader is removed (in that case by us). It takes billions of dollars, 150,000 U.S. soldiers to referee, myriad casualties, a civil war where both sides have to test each other’s power and then a wrenching process, which we midwifed, of Iraqi sects and tribes writing their own constitution defining how to live together without an iron fist. —3/23/11
The U.S. military is still needed as referee. It still is not clear that Iraq is a country that can be held together by anything other than an iron fist. It’s still not clear that its government is anything more than a collection of sectarian fiefs. —6/18/08
It’s time to blow the whistle on Friedman for abusive use of analogy.
I don’t really care for criticism like this. I’m as much a fan of sarcasm as anyone, but when I read FAIR, I prefer my sarcasm framed in more substantial critique. Friedman’s analaogies aside, I’d prefer to read the rebuttal to his condescending, detached narrative.
It may be suspected that Mr. Hart knows that the likely reader of the Fair Blog is, by now, already famililar with both the recent history of U.S.’s actions in Iraq and Mr. Friedman’s persistent mis-characterization of that history. However, when writing that “if any coach or referee did anything resembling what the U.S. has done in Iraq, they would be removed from the league, and probably put in jail.”, Mr. Hart will need to recount that history for us — after all, we come you, FAIR, for the history lesson we are never gonna get in corporate journalism. Also — Mr. Hart, watch your pronouns and number; you refenced a coach as singular, but you used “they” as the pronoun referencing the singular coach.
I guess what I’m saying is that, I don’t want to read all into an item, when the payoff isn’t information. If I was sitting next to Peter Hart in the office, I might want to hear this snarky remark. But, I read FAIR like the news section of a newspaper, not the comics. Maybe they should flag these as jokes or something, so I could skip it.
Although I sympathize with Mr. Hart’s exasperation at Friedman’s mystifying prominence on the pundit scene, I also think we therefore have to take him seriously as a symptom of decayed political discourse.
He has been intelligently relegated to the dunces’ corner by John Gray in the New York Review of Books VOLUME 52, NUMBER 13 and by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. I quote from Professor Gray:
“It is an irony of history that a view of the world falsified by the Communist collapse should have been adopted, in some of its most misleading aspects, by the victors in the cold war. Neoliberals, such as Friedman, have reproduced the weakest features of Marx’s thoughtâ┚¬”Âits consistent underestimation of nationalist and religious movements and its unidirectional view of history. They have failed to absorb Marx’s insights into the anarchic and self-destructive qualities of capitalism. Marx viewed the unfettered market as a revolutionary force, and understood that its expansion throughout the world was bound to be disruptive and violent. As capitalism spreads, it turns society upside down, destroying entire
industries, ways of life, and regimes. This can hardly be expected to be a peaceful process, and in fact it has been accompanied by major conflicts and social upheavals. The expansion of European capitalism in the nineteenth century involved the Opium Wars, genocide in the Belgian Congo, the Great Game in Central Asia, and many other forms of imperial conquest and rivalry. The seeming triumph of global capitalism at the end of the twentieth century followed two world wars, the cold war, and savage neocolonial conflicts. . . . . The metaphor of a flat world is worked relentlessly throughout this overlong book [The World is Flat], but it is not its incessant repetition that is most troublesome. It is Friedman’s failure to recognize that in many ways, some of them not difficult to observe, the world is becoming distinctly less flat. While he acknowledges the existence of an “unflat” world composed of people without access to the benefits of new technology, he never connects the growth of this netherworld
of the relatively poor with the advance of globalization. At times his failure to connect is almost comic.”
Donald P., you need to watch your spelling, and your grammar. I’m sure it was an oversight. I certainly don’t come to FAIR for a history lesson–what exactly do you mean? FAIR simply pointed out that Friedman is, very often, a willfully ignorant numbskull and lover of fantastic violence (when it’s visited upon those people). His use of the stupid and utterly wrong “referee” metaphor to characterize our murderous assault on Iraq is what’s so troubling here. Is there a need, really, to “rebut the narrative” or put out a history of Thomas Friedman’s imbecile remarks? I like it when FAIR simply puts the horn into Friedman, to remind me of what a jerk he really is. This is information–FAIR is pointing out Friedman’s outrageous remarks; we know he’s held in high esteem by the Corporate and Beltway press, so it does matter that he’s still a jackass.
Thank you Peter Hart. You do no wrong with me.
While I’m not a big fan of sports analogies, IF Friedman is going to overuse his ‘referee’ analogy, he should at least point out that the referee in these wars is NOT an unbiased party, he’s heavily ‘on-the-take’ from one side, that of the one aligned with the US economic interests. It’s as if the refs for the NBA playoffs were paid for exclusively by the LA Lakers — guess which way the close calls would go then…
Also, the word ‘referee’ seems to be stretched in this analogy. As Hart alludes to, referees in contests typically have power to mete out penalties during the contest, but they don’t have the power to directly end the careers of the participants. This, and other similar criticisms, show that Friedman is just trying to soften up/disguise what are truly military invasions by comparing the horrors (bombings, shootings, torturing, mass displacement of civilians, etc) of these campaigns to benign sporting contests.
I have to agree here w OBrien, like I hit this link and had my fill for a second but to be honest, if anyone is going to bring up Yugoslavia and stand-corrected or calumniated for it in a critique at the FAIR academy, I should like a little milk with my biscuit forgiving the analogy; I know some Serbs et al.–even Albanians–and these speak very differently gloamingly and with love of their homeland and how it was ravaged by the referees (so-called)…FAIR ought to have offered a short contrast omg should I hit “submit”? Probably not but…